Technology

Everyone is trying to make the business data analysis experience easier — but only Bi24 are succeeding because our solution has been designed with all end–users (no matter their level of experience) in mind. It’s faster, easier to use, just as accurate and secure but ultimately more cost effective.

Ad hoc reporting — Near real time reports across multiple datasets.

Ease of Use — It is easy to deliver user generated reports. Anyone can use CXAIR without special training.

Single Data View — Each query generates a dynamic dashboard of your data.

Simple deployment — Run as a bolt–on to your existing technical infrastructure.

Rapid Installation — Minimal time to configure (one day on average).

Hardware agnostic — Simple, fast, efficient and driven by end–user’s top requirements, CXAIR is also a development platform enabling multiple solutions across your IT and business needs.

Ad hoc Reporting

Ad hoc reporting allows business users to create specific, customised queries for themselves, which is not easy or almost impossible to do with traditional BI tools. This is one of Bi24’s strongest customer offerings, and we do this successfully by harnessing the power of search engine technology to deliver data rapidly, via user friendly and intuitive interfaces.

Empowering staff to self–service daily information requests, removes the need to involve the IT department to help answer ad–hoc data enquiries, freeing up this resource, removing delays in making decisions, increasing productivity and reducing costs.

Speed of Results

Bi24 utilises the raw power of search technology in order to assemble data from numerous disparate data sources for rapid querying and filtering. However, unlike standard search engine functionality, the solution has been enhanced to provide comprehensive data mining and analytics.

Comparative tests using an index containing over 170,000 documents / rows showed that Bi24 was able to complete over 1000 queries per second or 60,000 queries per minute, supporting an average query times of a maximum of 1.25 seconds for in excess of 500 concurrent users.

This astonishingly fast query performance (the criteria most closely linked to project success) is one of the main features buyers look for when purchasing BI tools. On an individual level, our customers find their data querying a more satisfying experience, it’s quick, accurate and they can run the queries themselves. On an enterprise level, productivity and efficiency are increased by saving time and the expense of having to rely on already over–burdened IT departments.

Ease–of–Use

Using Bi24’s solution requires no special training, technical querying or report writing skills, enabling users to answer business queries rapidly with the minimum of fuss and for themselves without having to rely on expert technicians.

Introducing a solution which can be easily deployed and used by anyone who is given access, not only improves productivity time, but frees up valuable IT resources to focus on other projects.

“It took 10 seconds to construct a query on 50,000 records with CXAIR, and the results were returned in less than a second, compared to the usual 30 to 45 minutes. This hasn’t just helped save my time as an individual, the whole department is able to offer a much higher quality of service.”

Stuart Rogers,

Stockport Pathology Department

Cost Savings

On average only 5% of an organisation will use Business Intelligence tools on a regular basis. The reason for this is often the cost of licenses, the complexity of the technology and lack of accessibility to the people in the business that need the information most.

Assuming only a 50% adoption of Bi24’s technology and a 50% reduction in time spent looking for information, this would (based on figures from Microsoft) provide an organisation with 150 staff a £417,000 cost saving per annum.

Compare this to organisations using traditional BI tools and you find that increasing the availability of BI to a further 20% of users will save £111,000 per annum, per 100 users. In an organisation with 1000 employees this would equate to a year on year saving of £1 million per annum.

Hiring skilled resources to write reports will typically cost in excess of £1,200 per day. Removing the need for this resource saves the business in excess of £247,000 per annum per head–count.

At Bi24 our solution has been developed around the concepts of ‘search’. It is designed to be used by everyone in an organisation. Empowering staff to self-service daily information requests, removes the need to involve the IT department to help answer ad-hoc data enquiries, freeing up this resource, removing delays in making decisions and reducing costs.

Data Assurance

Bi24 provides the ability to identify, analyse and fix poor quality data. This means that users can continue to run queries confident that any highlighted errors can be corrected and copied over onto the updated index.

Having the freedom and confidence to work data in which errors have been identified, enables the user to continue working without having to waste valuable time (or asking technical resource) to carry this procedure out.

Integration

Bi24’s software is rapid to install and takes minimal time to configure taking one day on average. It integrates with all major hardware platforms and is compatible with the market leading software packages including Lotus Domino and Microsoft Excel.

Because it’s so easy and quick to integrate, Bi24 is able to add value to existing products and helps to develop existing in–house applications. The speed of deployment and minimal hardware and bandwidth requirements offer considerable cost and time savings.

Scalability

Our product has been built upon search technology which provides the infrastructure to support extremely large concurrency of high data and query volumes. Bi24 is able to index both structured and unstructured data. (Structured data is information contained in one or more databases – whereas unstructured data relates to information such as web pages, word documents and spreadsheets). The data is mirrored in a super fast index that is optimised to return extremely large result sets.

Being able to run accurate queries involving large quantities of data, commonly located in unconnected and disparate sources of an organisation, all seamlessly linked together, provides tangible time saving benefits to users needing to obtain answers to in–depth enquiries.

Secure

Bi24’s solution includes many powerful security features to ensure that information presented is relevant and secure across and organisation. It can be integrated with Windows Authentication to provide a ‘single sign–on’ between the two solutions. Integration with IBM Lotus security ensures users are only granted access to documents from within the Lotus Notes environment, and row–level data is protected through ‘Realm based’ security restricting information all the way to an individual record.

The benefits of secure data access ensure both users and organisations not only comply with data protection legislation, but also reduces the risk of tampering and theft, and offers safe access from any location for numerous authorised individuals.

Visualisation – Single Data View

Unique VENN Diagrams facility Bi24 are the only company offering this facility in their software. VENN diagrams are the best way to clearly show relationships between complex data sets in a non–technical and intuitive manner.

So easy and simple to implement that any one can view complex information clearly, reducing the reliance on IT to do this resulting in savings in both time and resources. Combining the familiarity of a preferred interface with the power of Bi24’s data analysis tool, means that the overhead of using Excel Pivot tables and clogging up networks by bringing back large datasets into spreadsheets is completely avoided.

Dashboards

Users can easily design and build dynamic and highly visual dashboards that provide overviews of tabular and cross–tabular data which can be linked from different indexes and displayed as a single view i.e. the same query can be linked across multiple data sets without losing its context.

EXCEL Add–In

For those users who prefer to work in Excel, Bi24 includes an add–in module for MS Office which facilitates searching across one or more index from within Excel.

Combining the familiarity of a preferred interface with the power of Bi24’s data analysis tool, means that the overhead of using Excel Pivot tables and clogging up networks by bringing back large datasets into spreadsheets is completely avoided. So easy and simple to implement that any one can view complex information clearly, reducing the reliance on IT to do this resulting in savings in both time and resources.